PROJECTS

OTTOCONFESSION 

A digital database is integral to the project entitled “The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Confession Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-17th Centuries” (Project acronym: OTTOCONFESSION; funded by ERC Consolidator Grant, 2015-2020).The OTTOCON database aims to bring together polemical texts articulating a particular religious and confessional identity and aiming to define (or resist) the boundaries of orthodoxy and orthopraxy produced in the Ottoman Empire. 

HUNGARIAN MIGRANT STUDENTS ABROAD BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS

(Agnes Kelemen, PhD Candidate, Jewish Studies/History)

A comparative study of the social background of Hungarian Jewish students (Hungarian in terms of citizenship and Jewish in terms of religion) enrolled in four different cities’ (Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Bologna) universities abroad in the interwar period. Kelemen is gathering and processing data that the students gave about themselves in their university enrollment forms about their name, religion, father’s occupation, place of birth and place of residence (in Hungary). The project’s larger framework is her dissertation on interwar Hungarian Jewish student migration provoked by the antisemitic Hungarian “numerus clausus” law of 1920.

INSTERACTIVE CULTURAL ATLAS OF CENTRAL EUROPE

The project’s objective is to develop the first interactive Cultural Atlas of Central Europe, a professional web-based application accessible through personal computers and mobile devices. The expected outcome is an online tool featuring an embedded map that is linked to a database consisting of written and visual materials, which have been accumulated over the last twenty years by the students and faculty of the Department of Medieval Studies about the region’s rich cultural and visual resources. Because of its academic-standard written and visual materials, the Cultural Atlas of Central Europe will be suitable for individual as well as classroom learning, while its user friendly features such as an option to generate and customize one’s own travel routes and guidebooks (potentially supplemented by English language audio content) will serve intellectually inspired recreational purposes. The process of developing this atlas will simultaneously enhance the digital humanities expertise and experience of the department’s faculty and students, adding a valuable new dimension to their professional profiles.  

#istandwithCEU Social Media Campaign

(Eva Bognar, Jessie Labov, CMDS; Józesf Bóné, Anton Mudrak, Blinken OSA; Johannes Wachs, CNS) This project is based on the archive being developed at this moment by Blinken OSA which analyzes the media landscape in Hungary during the #istandwithCEU campaign. We will eventually be using network analysis to track dissemination of the campaign over time, and text mining/topic modeling to discover thematic trends and narrative contexts which supported the campaign. At the same time, the CMDS team is conducting qualitative analysis of media content to identify narratives that support or subvert Lex CEU, and will integrate their analysis with the quantitative projections. The result will be a holistic textual analysis of the campaign and its trajectory over several months.

Planet Telex

(Anton Mudrak, József Bóné, Robert Parnica, Anna Nakai, Blinken OSA; Johannes Wachs, CNS; Jessie Labov, CMDS) The complex telex communication network between the Free Europe Committee (FEC) based in New York and the Radio Free Europe (RFE) staff in Munich. It spans over two decades of the densest period of Radio Free Europe /Radio Liberty activity, and represents an exciting new territory for Cold War history research, exchange of ideas across the Iron Curtain, and (increasingly) the social networks that shaped the activities of the radios. This project will provide a detailed picture of how the entire FEC-RFE/RL system worked, who made decisions, who was responsible for channeling information to whom, and the deeper hierarchies based on this communication that are not always evident in the RFE/RL corporate records.

PARTNERS

Text Analysis Across Disciplines

This project has grown out of the work of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI), an 18-month exploratory project funded by the Humanities Initiative. After surveying the CEU community and spending the 2016-2017 year consulting with faculty, staff, and students in virtually every department and program on campus, the project team has identified text analysis as the one area of digital research which is much in demand, but critically absent from CEU’s curricula and research profile. Therefore, the TANAD ITI is offering courses, master classes, project incubation, and several public events to demonstrate the crucial role of text analysis in ‘small,’ ‘medium’ and ‘big data’ research. In order to introduce the techniques and methodologies specific to text analysis at CEU, the team will draw on working partnerships that the DHI has established with several Hungarian institutions: the new Centre for Digital Humanities at ELTE, the Petofi Literary Museum, as well as the European-wide DARIAH network.

VERA AND DONALD BLINKEN OPEN SOCIETY ARCHIVES

Blinken OSA is a complex archival institution. OSA is both a repository of important collections, primarily related to the history of the Cold War and grave international human rights violations, and a laboratory of archival experiments on new ways of assessing, contextualizing, presenting, and making use of archival documents. It is a research institute  dealing with archival, taxonomical, informational and historical problems related to its holdings, and also reflecting on the role, obligations, and limits (as well as how to overcome the limits) of repositories that preserve important historical sources. As an archival institution, OSA problematizes its existence, its tasks, its practices; we seek to work in a self-reflective way. OSA not only serves but works together with researchers who come to work in the archives, whose experiences we draw upon to assess and evaluate our holdings and practices.

ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS LABORATORY (SYSLAB)

The Systems Laboratory aims at enabling use of latest Information and Communication Technologies in the areas of CEU core expertise. Special attention is paid to modeling of environmental and social systems and promoting use of geospatial technologies. Syslab develops and runs the graduate courses and workshops on use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing tailored for the needs of various CEU departments and units.

VISUAL STUDIES PLATFORM  (VSP)

Visual Studies Platform (VSP) is a cross-disciplinary initiative designed to explore and propose innovative approaches to research and teaching visual imagery in the digital century. It encompasses research on visual theory, method and history across different media forms, including visual arts, film, photography and performance.